Art - Legitimate Copies, Fair Use, Fakes and Copyright

Prehistoric Art

• Agiant frieze showing lions chasing a herd of bison covers one wall. An abstract drawing featuring female genitalia, a figure that is half-man, halfstag and a bison’s head adorns another. Below is a bear’s skull on a pedestal that may have been an altar.
  
  These are among the masterpieces that went on display yesterday as President Hollande opened a replica of the Chauvet cave in southern France, which contains the world’s oldest known art. The copy, built at a cost to the French taxpayer of €55 million, combines digital technology with prehistoric techniques. It will enable visitors to appreciate the talent of the Aurignacian artists who decorated the cave 30,000 or so years ago.
  
  “These paintings have revolutionised our knowledge of the evolution of art,” said Jean Clottes, a French historian.
  
  The 8,500 sq m cave at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc was discovered in 1994 but those hoping for a glance at the 1,000 or so charcoal and ochre drawings that represent 14 animal species were disappointed when the government chose to seal the cave. Officials said they wanted to avoid the mistakes made at Lascaux in the Dordogne, where a smaller and younger but nevertheless remarkable cave that was discovered in 1940 suffered severe damage after it was opened to the public.
  
  The copy of the Chauvet cave, a kilometre from the original, is three times smaller but otherwise faithful, Mr Clottes said.
  
  The walls were replicated with 3D technology that used a cloud of tiny dots to trace their contours, and the stalactites and stalagmites. The scientists took 6,000 digital photographs of the artworks, which were reproduced by hand on the cave walls.
  
  

Richard Prince

• He’s appropriated images of American icons ranging from the Malboro man to Brooke Shields – and even once published The Catcher in the Rye with his name on the jacket instead of JD Salinger’s.
  
  But 40 years into his career, Richard Prince’s practice of taking images from other sources without permission, changing them minimally (if at all), presenting them as his own work and selling them with a hefty price tag is still proving controversial.
  
  The artist’s most recent works are screenshots from Instagram, blown up and jet-printed on six-foot canvas, the only other changes to the images being cryptic remarks by Prince added to the comment threads.
  
  When Prince first presented the works at the Gagosian Gallery in New York last September, New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz described them as “genius trolling”, though others were less enthusiastic.
  
  At the Frieze art fair this month, Prince presented a new set of Instagram pictures mainly taken from the feed belonging to SuicideGirls, a community of models and burlesque performers with a punk rock aesthetic.
  
  One of the women in the photographs, Doe Deere, posted on Instagram that she had been told the picture of her had been sold for $90,000.
  
  The owners of the images Prince has appropriated have occasionally sought legal redress. In 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou sued after Prince exhibited 35 images from his book Yes, Rasta, with additions to the pictures including splodges over the eyes and an electric guitar.
  
  Though Prince was ordered to destroy the pictures, he won an appeal, with the court ruling that Cariou’s copyright had not been infringed.
  
  Prince’s gallery sold one of the images for $2.5m.
  
  Rather than sue, Suicide Girls founder Selena Mooney, known as Missy Suicide, has posted on the group’s website that she will sell prints of the images for $90, with proceeds going to charity. She wrote:
  
  If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavour I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art. I was once really annoyed by Forever 21 selling shirts with our slightly altered images on them, but an artist?
  
  Richard Prince is an artist and he found the images we and our girls publish on Instagram as representative of something worth commenting on, part of the zeitgeist, I guess? Thanks Richard!
  
  In a post retweeted by Prince, she concluded: “Do we have Mr. Prince’s permission to sell these prints? We have the same permission from him that he had from us.;)”

Very Close Copies

• Chris Foss SF Illustrations

• Sir Anish Kapoor has expressed outrage about the appearance of a sculpture in China that appears identical to his Cloud Gate in Chicago.
  
  Representatives of the British-Indian sculptor said that he was shocked at the “blatant plagiarism” of his sculpture, a giant, mirrored piece that is displayed in Millennium Park, Chicago, and reflects the city’s skyline.
  
  Reports in China, including one from the state-run People’s Daily, said that a “stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an oil bubble” would be unveiled this month in Karamay, a city in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang known for its rich oil fields. Work on the sculpture began in 2013, at the site of the city’s first oil well. The reports carried photographs of the Chinese sculpture, which resembles Kapoor’s. It is not known who created the Chinese work. In a statement yesterday, Kapoor said that he wanted to “take this to the highest level and pursue those responsible in the courts”.
  
  He added: “It seems that in China today it is permissible to steal the creativity of others. I hope that the mayor of Chicago will join me in this action. The Chinese authorities must act to stop this kind of infringement and allow the full enforcement of copyright.”
  
  Many Chinese people have complained about the prevalence of plagiarism in their country, even for high-profile projects.
  
  One of the official songs for the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be held in China, has been criticised for its similarity to Let it Go, the hit song from the Disney film Frozen.
  
  Kapoor, 61, was born in Mumbai and has lived and worked in London since the 1970s. He built the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the twisting helter-skelter artwork at the London Olympics in 2012. It is expected to become the world’s longest slide when it reopens next year.
  
  
  (Kapoor's Cloud on left; Karamay on right